FDR - Jean Edward Smith [320]
Japan had raised the ante, and Roosevelt began to have misgivings about a confrontation in the Pacific. In early October 1940 Churchill requested the United States send a naval squadron (“the bigger the better”) to visit Singapore—a bit of saber rattling he thought would intimidate the Japanese.19 General Marshall and Admiral Stark thought the move unnecessarily provocative, and FDR agreed. With the election a month away, the president simply ignored Churchill’s request and sent no reply.
Throughout the winter and spring of 1940–41 Roosevelt received conflicting advice. The hawks in the administration—Stimson, Knox, Morgenthau, Ickes, and Harry Hopkins—urged the president to tighten the screws on Japan and embargo the shipment of the oil it so desperately needed. (Eighty percent of Japanese petroleum came from the United States.) Secretary of State Hull and the military urged FDR to go slow. Hull favored continued negotiations; Marshall and Stark argued that if Japan’s oil supply were closed off she would be forced to seek other sources. The Dutch East Indies, Burma, Malaya, and even the Philippines would be threatened. Not only was the United States unprepared, but a military confrontation against Japan in Southeast Asia would undermine efforts to support Britain in the Atlantic. “Every day that we are able to maintain peace and still support the British is valuable time gained,” said Stark. Marshall agreed. This was “as unfavorable a moment as you could choose for provoking trouble,” the chief of staff told the president, and he urged that the Marine garrison in Shanghai be withdrawn to avoid a possible incident.20
With the Battle of the Atlantic raging full tilt, Japanese policy remained a secondary issue for Roosevelt. But he was not dismayed by the split among his advisers. The president liked to keep his saddlebags balanced. When Justice James McReynolds of Tennessee resigned from the Supreme Court in February 1941, Morgenthau suggested FDR appoint Cordell Hull (another Tennessean) to the vacancy and make Stimson secretary of state. As Morgenthau saw it, that would remove the principal advocate of negotiations from the cabinet and put the more bellicose Stimson in charge. Roosevelt refused to be stampeded. It was a bad suggestion, he told Morgenthau. In retrospect, said the president, he wasn’t at all sure Stimson had been right about Manchuria in 1932 and that Hull’s tactics of negotiation might have been the better course for the United States to pursue. “The president’s comments certainly surprised me,” wrote Morgenthau.21
Policymakers in Tokyo were equally divided. According to longtime ambassador Joseph C. Grew—a schoolmate of FDR at Groton and Harvard who sometimes wrote “Dear Frank” letters to the president—the Emperor, the premier, and a majority of the cabinet, as well as most of the Japanese Navy, favored continued negotiation with the United States. The Army, desperate for victory in China, pressed for war, as did Foreign Minister Matsuoka, but thus far they had been unable to convince their colleagues.22*
On April 13, 1941, Matsuoka scored an important diplomatic victory when Japan and the Soviet Union announced the conclusion of a neutrality pact between the two nations. Again Washington was caught flat-footed. Russia recognized the independence of Manchukuo and implicit Japanese control; Japan reciprocated with respect to Outer Mongolia, a Soviet satellite similarly detached from China. The pact represented a significant strategic breakthrough. By resolving the smoldering colonial tensions along Manchukuo’s border, it freed both nations to shift their military focus elsewhere.
While Matsuoka prepared the way for war, the peace faction in the Japanese government